There are two buybacks that moved the market this week. SK Hynix is buying its own stock. The US Treasury just doubled its own bond buybacks.
1. What changed this week
Korea: the buyback changes the range
Last week we trimmed into the bounce near ₩1.63M and kept the regime call at wide-range chop. Wednesday tested that call hard. Memory got hit, Hynix bled all day, and then management answered with the largest buyback-and-cancellation program in Korean market history, wrapped in a bigger pledge: at least half of the free cash flow they expect through 2027 goes back to shareholders, between buybacks and dividends. The stock gapped up double digits and the KOSPI ripped hard enough to trigger the buy-side sidecar, which almost never fires.
If you line up the full memory crash, June top to late-July bottom, across Hynix, Micron, and SanDisk. Hynix and Micron have bounced almost the same distance off their lows. Sounds even. It isn’t. Hynix fell much deeper, so the same bounce refills far less of the hole. The US peers have each clawed back close to 1/2 of their crash. Hynix has made about 1/4.
The is not a memory discount. Most of it is a Korea discount: risk appetite, the leveraged-ETF unwind we flagged in July (”Memory Crashed on Leverage, Not on AI”), and nerves about the cycle top. The one thing it cannot fix is the memory cycle. We won’t pretend it can.
Our read: the regime moves from wide-range chop to conditional bullish. Around ₩1.95M to ₩2.0M, Hynix would simply have caught up to its US peers’ repair, and that zone happens to sit right on prior resistance. More upside is possible from there even if the memory cycle is still in the play.
Bitcoin: the box broke. Now comes the corridor.
Last week we wrote that a decisive break of $65K opens real room. It took four sessions. Wednesday the box gave way: the biggest daily move since March, a two-month high, a brief tag of $70K this morning. Three sparks at once. The Treasury buyback, an SEC proposal that finally gives crypto issuance a rulebook, and a White House summit.
The chart shows a layered corridor of trapped coins running from the high $60Ks into the low $80Ks, and price stepped into the first layer this week. That first layer is also the only one that has visibly thinned.
The good part. The base under this market is the strongest we’ve seen all cycle. A very large new cost basis formed in the low $60Ks while everyone argued about for the entire 2 month period. Coins absorbed at real prices, during the most boring stretch of the range. That base is why we don’t read this breakout as a fakeout, even though the move itself ran mostly on short liquidations, and squeeze fuel is finite.
My view: the momentom will drive the price higher and every slow movement towards 80k gives its a bigger chance to break the 80k. Still don’t fade the resistance from 80k to 82.5k. We could have better idea depending on volume and price action when we drive closer to these levels. The most healthy bull ran initiates still when more coins could be absorbed below 80k.
$80K is not a ceiling. It’s a test we should watch closely.
